THE DEFENSE OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV(ANALYTICAL STUDIES OF THE NOVEL “LOLITA”)

UDC 82-311.2 UDC 82-51

THE DEFENSE OF VLADIMIR NABOKOV

(ANALYTICAL STUDIES OF THE NOVEL “LOLITA”)

Korablin Vladimir Alexandrovich

A.A. Zhdanov Leningrad State University

Faculty of Law (1962 г.)

Abstract: The article analyzes the work of Vladimir Nabokov through the prism of his legal and moral “defense” from accusations of amoralism, aesthetic egoism and political detachment. The author examines Nabokov’s artistic strategy as a system of intellectual self-defense, in which style, play and structure become forms of resistance to ideological violence and vulgar sociologism , as well as the writer’s relations with criticism, censorship and the domestic reader. Korablin proposes to see in Nabokov not a fugitive from reality, but an independent thinker defending the sovereignty of the aesthetic.

Keywords: Vladimir Nabokov, literary criticism, aestheticism, Lolita, ethical relativism, self-irony, ideology and literature, freedom of creativity, censorship, defense of the aesthetic, Nabokov and Russia, polemics with criticism.

INTRODUCTION

Ten years ago, the well-known writer Vladimir Dudintsev in his article “The Color of Our Clothes” (Literaturnaya Gazeta, August 17, 1988. No 33 /5203/ p. 11) wrote: “Nabokov comes too close and too hastily to what is the very last thing to know. According to the laws of nature. Disgusting old man! I look at his portrait – he gave me the key to understanding his face through Lolita… In every writer there is always something of his characters.”

In the same issue of Literaturnaya Gazeta, in the article “Vladimir Nabokov:

“Between Two Banks” (Round Table), literary critic Dmitry Urnov says: “Nabokov is like one of Dostoevsky’s characters, say, Stavrogin (from the novel “Demons”), who himself became a writer, and wrote a number of novels from Stavrogin’s position.”

On the pages of this article, I, a professional lawyer, will have to defend the honor and dignity of the great writer, scientist and nobleman Vladimir Nabokov, protect it from those literary critics, writers and readers who did not understand the novel, could not understand its ideas, identified the image of Humbert with the personality of the author of the novel “Lolita”.

The novel, I believe, is based on a case history or several case histories of patients like Humbert who suffer from deviations in the field of eroticism. It can be assumed that Nabokov wrote the novel at the request of the Association of Psychoanalysts. Very often on the pages of the novel terms found in the scientific works of Sigmund Freud and his students are used dislike for the material from which the work was built, and it turned out to be a classic sex-pathological novel. In the afterword to the novel, the author wrote: “The book moved slowly, with many interruptions… Once or twice I almost burned an unfinished draft, and I remember when I had already carried my Joanita Dark almost to the evening shadow of the incinerator, crookedly standing on the lawn of the yard, when I was stopped by the thought that the spirit of the executed book would wander through my files for the rest of my days.”^[1]

PART I

The hero of the novel Humbert is a rather complex personality. He is a scientist, the author of textbooks written by him on orders from universities. His last textbook was published on the day of his arrest. He lectured at universities, taught English, and had acquaintances among psychiatrists. Until the age of thirteen, Humbert grew up as a quite normal cheerful child. In his young years, he dreamed of becoming a psychiatrist. When he was three years old, his mother died on a picnic from lightning. Riviera. Humbert studied at an English school, received excellent grades, and went in for sports. Before meeting the “original girl”, Lolita’s predecessor – Annabella, he was a completely normal, slightly spoiled child. Therefore, the cause of his disease cannot be attributed to the shortcomings of upbringing or innate predisposition. He knows about his illness, the cause and the beginning of its occurrence, he is familiar with the method of psychoanalysis. Humbert understands that he needs to be treated, but at the same time does not want to part with his sexual obsession – love for girls between the ages of twelve and fourteen.

Humbert, while in custody for the molestation of the young Lolita and for the murder of the screenwriter Quilty, who kidnapped his underage lover from him, looking at his freedom through the latticed window of a prison cell, writes a diary (sometimes at the end of the novel the author Nabokov no longer calls it a diary, but a novel). Humbert’s diary resembles a detailed summary of a defense speech. In it, every now and then he mentally addresses the jury, tries to mitigate his guilt in their eyes, sometimes philosophically, somewhat playfully, seeks to justify the nature of his attraction to the “nymphets”. For a psychotherapist, this diary would be a medical history.

Already on the first page of the novel, the author gives a clue to Humbert’s illness: “Did she (Lolita) have any predecessors? How could they be… I will say more: there would have been no Lolita if I had not fallen in love with one distant summer of one primordial girl in a certain principality by the sea” (p. 1 of the novel).

Humbert fondly recalls his first, short, tragically cut short love for young Annabella: “She had a honey-colored skin, thin hands, cropped brown hair, long eyelashes, a big bright mouth” – and this is how I see Lolita, – he adds (p. 3 of the novel). Annabella was a charming girl, a few months younger than thirteen-year-old Humbert. Her parents were old friends of Humbert’s aunt, were very scrupulous about decency. The author writes that the brains of young people were tuned in to the tone of intelligent European teenagers of that time and that environment. She dreamed of being a nurse in some Asian country, he dreamed of being a famous spy. Suddenly they fell in love with each other – madly, clumsily, shamelessly, painfully… At some point, they managed to stay alone on the beach away from the strict eyes of their parents, in a secluded place, they wanted to make love…, but suddenly two bearded tourists came out of the water with exclamations, scared off the young ones. A few days earlier, late one evening, Annabella had managed to deceive her parents’ vigilance, and in the grove behind the villa on the ruins of the stone wall, the young lovers had a moment when they were ready были подарить друг другу самые глубокие чувства, but from the side of the house I heard the voice of Annabella’s mother, calling her daughter home. Soon Annabella and her parents left this fabulous resort, full of love and exciting expectations… And four months later, Annabella died of typhus. Humbert asks himself: “Was it not from the brilliance of that distant summer that a crack began through my whole life… I am sure, however, that in a magical and fatal way, Lolita began with Annabella. I also know that Annabella’s death consolidated the dissatisfaction of that delirious summer and became an obstacle to all other love during the cold years of my youth” (p. 5 of the novel). “This mimosa thicket, the mist of stars, the chills, the honeydew, and all my torment remained with me, and this girl with her feet smoothed by the sea and a fiery tongue haunted me from that time on, until finally, twenty-four years later, I dispelled the delusion by resurrecting her into another,” he continues his reflections on the cause of the illness that brought him to a prison cell (p.7 of the novel).

His constant sexual dissatisfaction with adult women led him to create the theory of the “nymphet”. This theory arose as a weak attempt to justify his attraction to young girls. According to his theory, a “nymphet” is a girl between the ages of nine and fourteen, who for some many times older than men with Humbert’s deviations serves as a true pleasure, they experience a nymphical, i.e. demonic essence. according to Humbert, girls are prematurely mature. He believes that Annabella was not a nymphet for him, as they were the same age at the time. “What is needed here is an age difference of 10, 30 or even 40 years” (pp. 8-9 of the novel). Humbert treats his theory of the “nymphet” with some sarcasm: if there were no nymphets, then “we initiates, we solitary sailors, we nympholepts, would have gone mad long ago” (p. 8 of the novel). “On the outside, he had so-called normal relations with earth-born women, whose breasts were pumpkins or pears, but inside he was burned in the hellish furnace of concentrated lust, aroused in me by every nymphet he met” (p. 9 of the novel), that is, he did not receive real sexual satisfaction from adult women. He “was seized by fear, then shame, suffocated by social prohibitions. Psychoanalytics lured with pseudo-liberation from libidophilia” (p. 10 of the novel). Pay attention to the fact that on the pages of the novel we constantly encounter terminology characteristic of psychoanalytic literature. There is no doubt that the author of the novel was well aware of Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis and, I believe, could use several case histories of “nymphetic patients”. Nabokov is not only a writer, but also a scientist who enriched psychiatric science on a global scale. I think that after the publication of the novel “Lolita”, psychiatrists have a new term in the diagnosis:

“nymphetic disease” in the clinical picture of Humbert’s disease.

In Humbert, on the one hand, the attraction to nymphets was constantly fighting, on the other hand, he was tormented by a moral prohibition, as well as the fear that he was constantly being watched by the police. “I have often asked myself,” he reasoned, “what happened to them afterwards, to these nymphets. In our cast-iron-lattice world of cause and effect, could not the shudder I stole from them affect their future?.. But will this not affect her later, have I not somehow spoiled her in her future fate by involving her image in my secret voluptuousness? Oh, this has been and will be the subject of great and terrible doubts!” He adds to his thought: “I have found out, however, what they turn into, these charming, maddening nymphets, when they grow up” (p. 12 of the novel). At the same time, he remembered the underage prostitute Monica, whom he met in Paris (pp. 12-13 of the novel).

In order to get rid of vicious and dangerous urges, Humbert decided to get married. His wasted father had died by this time, leaving a small fortune (p.15 of the novel). He chose to marry Valeria, a woman of thirty years old, the daughter of a Polish doctor, with whom he had been treated for a heart disease for some time. it suited Valeria, who, in spite of her small size, pretended to be a little girl, in spite of her thirty years. She was an ersatz nymphet, giving Humbert no real sexual satisfaction. After a brief wedding ceremony at the town hall, Humbert forced Valeria to change into a simple child’s nightgown. By morning, Valeria was hysterical from the bullying. This marriage lasted for four years. He says about his marriage to Valeria: “I turned to her unleavened flesh only occasionally, only in moments of extreme need, extreme despair” (p. 17 of the novel). It should be noted right away that Valeria is the first victim of Humbert’s disease. After four years of painful married life (there were no children in the marriage), Valeria told her husband that there was another person in her life, that she was unhappy in her marriage and wanted to divorce as soon as possible.

Recalling the nymphet adventures, Humbert writes in his diary that he dreamed of enjoying the nymphet, the little sister of his university classmate, and then shooting himself (p. 20 of the novel). From this we can conclude that his passion for the nymphet is dearer to him than his own life, and therefore he can be aggressive towards the victim of his desires.

After the death of his uncle, Humbert received an inheritance of $3,000 a year on the condition that he move to the United States, where he would work for his uncle’s firm. After moving to New York, he completed the first volume of the Comparative History of French Literature at the suggestion of the university. The work took him two years, he worked fifteen hours a day. In the dusty heat, however, he looked out for nymphets playing in Central Park. The decline of mental strength led him to a psychotherapeutic sanatorium for a year and a half. Then he returned to work and soon fell ill again (p. 23 of the novel).

In order to oust feelings and attraction to nymphets from consciousness, Humbert was on a polar voyage for twenty months, joking with a sigh that there were no nymphets among the Eskimos (p. 24 of the novel). But this “isolation” from nymphets did not help his health. Because of sexual dissatisfaction, he again had to fight for his health (“melancholy, confusion of mind”). He played tricks on psychiatrists, leading them away from the phenomenon that led to their illness, offering them “false memories”, “spied scenes of parental cohabitation, and not allowing them to even remotely guess about the real misfortune of their patient” (p. 25 of the novel). that he “knew how to make the patient believe that he was a witness to his own conception” (p. 25 of the novel). By bribing a nurse, Humbert gained access to the archives of the hospital. From his medical history, he learned that he was considered a “potential homosexual” and an “absolute impotent.” This amused him very much and he even spent an extra month in a sanatorium (p. 25 of the novel).

On leaving the sanatorium, Humbert decided to rest in a village or in some “sleepy town” where he could continue his literary activity. He was offered to see a room in Mrs. Haze’s house. Humbert did not like either the hostess herself or the squalid furnishings in the house, and he was about to leave the house when he suddenly saw Mrs. Haze’s daughter. “It was the same child (as Annabella), the same thin, honey-colored shoulders, the same silky, flexible, naked back, the same blond cap of hair, the half-developed breasts that he caressed on that immortal day…, saw again the lovely sunken belly, recognized the dark brown spot on her side… A quarter of a century since then, the life lived has narrowed” (p. 29 of the novel). At that moment, Humbert remembered with a smile the doctor who was destined to cure him of all diseases (p. 29 of the novel). “This Lolita, my Lolita,” continued Humbert in a state of euphoria, “must have completely eclipsed her prototype. I only want to emphasize that the revelation on the American veranda was only a consequence of that “principality by the sea” in my suffering adolescence. Everything that happened between these two events amounted to a series of blind searches and delusions and false beginnings of joy. Everything that these two beings had in common made them one for me. I have no illusions, though. My judges will see in the above only the contortions of a madman” (p. 30 of the novel). The author of the novel again emphasizes through the experiences of his hero that if there had been no Annabella in his childhood, there would have been no Lolita. Humbert had been looking for Annabella for twenty-four years and found her in the form of Lolita. “The emptiness of my soul has managed to absorb all the charms and compare them with the features of my dead bride” (p. 30 of the novel) – he ends his obsession. The search for thirteen-year-old Annabella, the first love in the life of young Humbert, which became an obsession, lasted more than twenty years Humbert:

“We loved with a premature love, distinguished by that frenzy that so often breaks the life of mature people. I was a tough boy and survived; but the poison remained in the wound” (p. 9 of the novel).

Let me remind you that Humbert’s mother died tragically when he was three years old, his father had mistresses and his own hotel. Therefore, young Humbert had no one to share with him about the “poison in the wound” that tormented him after Annabella’s death.

In his younger years, with the help of a psychotherapist, the disease could be cured. But over the years, the disease has become persistent. In the preface to the novel, written by the author himself, it is categorically stated:

“If our mad memoirist had gone to a competent psychopathologist in that fateful summer of 1947 , no trouble would have happened. All this is true, but then there would be no this book.” From this statement, it should be concluded that “Lolita” is an educational novel from the field of sexual pathology. There is nothing superfluous in the novel, everything is subordinated to the beginning and cause of Humbert’s disease, the course of the disease, which has a destructive power for society and the carrier of the disease himself.

If we translate the symptoms of Humbert’s erotic suffering into the medical language of psychoanalysis, we will see that Sigmund Freud called such a painful state an “affective experience” generated by a “traumatic scene” – in this case, the dissatisfaction of the adolescent’s sexual feelings, his libido did not find an outlet, the death of his beloved girl “fixed the dissatisfaction… and became an obstacle to any other love” (for the clinical picture, the author’s quote is taken, since it is unlikely that even the most experienced psychiatrist would find such an accurate and concise term to define the patient’s condition). Sigmund Freud uses the term “fixation” in a similar clinical picture, which means “delay, stuckness” at one of the stages of sexual development, the impossibility of another form of sexual life.

So, let us continue the clinical picture of the sick Humbert in the language of psychoanalysis: Humbert has been suffering from memories of incomplete feelings since the age of thirteen. These peculiar symbols of memories of love for Annabella over a long period of his life led Humbert to be sexually attracted to girls between the ages of twelve and fourteen. They were “Annabella’s deputies” until he “finally, twenty-four years later, dispelled the delusion by resurrecting her in another” (Lolita). (And in this case, for

clinical picture, it is more expedient to use the exact term of the author of the novel). Lolita completely ousted from Humbert’s mind the image of his first lover, thirteen-year-old Annabella. Freud believes that “such a fixation of mental life on pathogenic traumas is one of the most important characteristic features of neurosis. Pathogenic experiences of patients, psychic traumas are equivalent to bodily injuries”,^[2] and the treatment is long and sometimes unpredictable, since it is necessary that the patient wants to be cured, and Humbert, on the one hand, understands that he is sick and needs to be treated, and on the other hand, he resists treatment, fearing to lose the pleasant obsession with nymphets. suffering in the field of eroticism, said: “Instead of willingly telling us about their sex life, they try with all their might to hide it. People are generally insincere in sexual matters… The combination of scrupulousness and voluptuousness determines the sexual behavior of the majority of cultured people” (3. Freud Upom. Work, p. 34). In psychoanalytic research, patients often transfer feelings of hostility to the doctor. This is fully true of Humbert, as already mentioned earlier in this article. Sharing his observations of patients suffering in the field of eroticism, Sigmund Freud believes that “people fall ill if they cannot really satisfy their erotic need because of external obstacles or because of an internal lack of adaptability. Sexual need and its deprivation are a factor that plays a role in the mechanism of neurosis” (S. Freud, op. work, p. 41). On the way of attraction to nymphets is criminal law and morality. But instincts are stronger than Humbert’s “I”, they are these instincts, sometimes paralyzing his mind. The struggle of “drives” with “prohibitions” is the cause of the disease of his nervous system.

Lolita did not lead Humbert to healing. One young girl was replaced by another young girl. The disease remained. Neither criminal, nor moral, nor religious prohibitions could stop Humbert’s attraction to young girls. Perhaps it is incurable? The author of the novel seems to pose the question to psychotherapists: “Could you cure the eccentric patient Humbert?”

In one of the articles, Sigmund Freud expresses his opinion in which cases a psychotherapist should refuse to treat patients:

1) if patients do not have a certain education and a relatively trustworthy character;

2) if patients do not want to be treated, but agree to treatment only because of the request of relatives;

3) if patients are not able to be educated;

4) if the patients are at the age of 50 years and older, since at this age the plasticity is lost and the personality does not lend itself to education.

As for young men, they respond perfectly to the effects of treatment (S. Freud, op. work, p. 54).

It can be concluded that the very educated and still relatively young Humbert has no contraindications to treatment – only “resistance”, which is quite common with this kind of patients. “There is no other bliss on earth like the bliss of not an undead nymphet,” says Humbert (p. 149 of the novel). It is very difficult for him to part with this “bliss.” The psychotherapist has a very difficult task in overcoming the resistance of the patient, “shrouded in a shell of lies.”

The author of the novel believes in the method of treatment with the use of psychoanalysis. In the preface to the novel “Lolita” it is said: “If our mad memoirist had gone to a competent psychopathologist in that fateful summer of 1947 , no trouble would have happened.” This important statement has already been referred to above in the pages of the article. Humbert also believes in treatment by the method of psychoanalysis and this is confirmed by the following evidence. called sublimation. Through sublimation, sexual energy is transformed into various types of activity that are acceptable to the individual and society. A variety of sublimation is sports, intellectual work, creativity (3. Freud, up. work, p. 579). Let me remind you again that Humbert worked for two years on the first volume of the Comparative History of French Literature, working fifteen hours a day, but in Central Park in New York, in his spare time, he “looked out for nymphets”. Sexual dissatisfaction contributed to the loss of strength. Humbert was forced to go to a psychoanalytic sanatorium for treatment for a year and a half did not help. He ironically calls himself “sublimated Humbert” (p. 264 of the novel).

In psychotherapy, there is another method of treatment – “isolation”, which consists in the fact that the patient moves away from the psychotraumatic situation and from the emotional experiences associated with it (3. Freud, up. work, p. 579). Humbert was on a polar voyage for twenty months, and from his observations he came to the conclusion that there were no nymphets among the Eskimos. And this method of “isolation” did not help him to oust the attraction to nymphets from his consciousness. He fell ill again and had to be treated again in a psychotherapeutic sanatorium. which he receives from love for nymphets, so he misleads doctors about his illness, ironically ridicules them.

There is another method of treatment in psychoanalysis: the doctor aims to eliminate the symptoms of the disease with the help of hypnosis – “to force the patient to transfer to the mental state in which the symptom first appeared”, i.e. to restore in his emotional memory the “traumatic situation”, “to reproduce this pathogenic moment with signs of strong emotional excitement”. In this state, the symptom that once led to the onset of the disease will be removed. and the return of the symptom will no longer be possible (see 3. Freud, up. work, p. 19, 58).

The educated Humbert, who dreamed of becoming a psychiatrist in his youth, is also familiar with this method: “Another experienced psychiatrist who is now studying my work (diary) – and whom Dr. Humbert has managed to immerse, I hope, in a state of rabbit hypnosis – would undoubtedly very much like the narrator to take his Lolita to the seashore and there find at least the “ratification” of this urge, namely, the deliverance from the “subconscious” delusion of an incomplete nursery romance with the original little Miss Lee” (Annabella) (p. 150 of the novel). The reader who does not know the basics of Freudianism has no idea that this ironic statement of the sick Humbert refers to к одному из методов лечения психоаналитическим method with the use of hypnosis, and the patient warns in advance that he will “resist” this treatment in order to avoid the loss of nymphetic pleasure.

So, from the analysis of the clinical picture, it follows that Humbert wants to be treated, but strenuously resists. Therefore, he is a very difficult patient to heal. This, in brief, is the clinical picture of Humbert’s disease from the point of view of psychoanalysis.

In Vladimir Nabokov’s work, Humbert’s disease is presented in artistic images and in constantly changing tones of colors. However, without knowledge of the basics of psychoanalysis, it is difficult to understand the language as well as the idea of the novel, and most readers are carried away by erotic scenes, ignoring psychoanalytic opuses. There are many Western literary works and movies in which the characters suffer from painful symptoms that are destructive, while these symptoms of illness are actually eliminated in a psychotherapeutic way. Love, for example, as a carnal feeling, is very complex. It can be quite organic, normal, of course, not without experiences inherent in the human psyche, and in some cases there are people who have an “obsession with love”. Such painful love, as a rule, turns into a destructive force. This also applies to jealousy. Jealousy can be natural, for the sake of preserving the relationship of lovers, or it can be pathological and also turn into a destructive force. In our Great Medical Encyclopedia, unfortunately, I did not find “obsessive states” (phobias) of “love” and “jealousy”. But the symptoms of pathological love and pathological jealousy can be eliminated in a psychotherapeutic way. And people should be aware of this.

In the article, constant footnotes are made indicating the pages of the novel so that the reader is convinced that the author of the novel tried to help the “humberts” understand their disease, to gain courage and patience in the matter of their treatment and to save lolitas from molestation, and in general to warn some people against tragedies, the consequence of which in this case is sexual ailments.

I talked about the novel with many people, among whom were engineers, historians, lawyers, writers, actors, even with one famous theater director and teacher of the theater institute, but all of them believed that “Lolita” was a wonderful novel about the love of a twelve-year-old girl (nymphet) for an adult thirty-seven-year-old man. At the same time, they proceeded from Pushkin’s principle – “All ages are submissive to love.” Unfortunately, such evaluations of the novel stem from our ignorance of at least the elementary foundations of psychoanalysis. In Soviet literature, starting from 1936, when science, culture and literature were divided into Soviet and bourgeois, it was positively forbidden to refer to the works of Sigmund Freud in the field of psychoanalysis, opinions were allowed only in the form of criticism of his teaching. When criticizing Freudism, scientists did not even often refer to his specific works, indicating pages, etc., distorted his scientific views on psychiatry. in the textbook on the Theory of State and Law, the subtitle to one of the chapters, “Freudian Concepts of Law,” was marked in bold type, although Sigmund Freud never wrote about law, as I later learned from his writings. It was then that I went to the Public Library on the Fontanka for the first time out of curiosity, where, having familiarized myself with the catalog, I began to read the works of Sigmund Freud in microfilms (a microfilm is a photographic film of a work). Students of medical institutes, as well as students of the law and philosophy faculties of the university, it was enough to present a student card. Other students were deprived of this opportunity to use the works of Sigmund Freud. The ban on the use of the works of Sigmund Freud led to the fact that several generations of our citizens were not familiar with psychoanalysis as a method of studying mental processes and a method of treating neuroses, as well as with psychoanalysis as a philosophical direction.

The preface to the novel frankly says: “As a description of a clinical case, Lolita is undoubtedly destined to become one of the classic works of psychiatric literature, and we can guarantee that in ten years the term “nymphets” will be in dictionaries and

newspapers.”

It is clear from the language of the writer, and the language of a person is always individual, that the preface was written not by Doctor of Philosophy John Ray, but by the author of the novel Vladimir Nabokov himself. To prove this, he himself

Vladimir Nabokov, “On the Book Entitled Lolita” (Afterword to the 1958 American Edition ), wrote: “After my performance as John Ray, who is pleasant in all respects , the character in Lolita who writes the ‘preface’ to it, any comment proposed on my behalf may seem to the reader – it may even seem to me – imitation of Vladimir Nabokov, who is analyzing his book” (p. 289 novels). The novel was created for educational purposes, it became an excellent artistic advertisement in the field of psychotherapy.

Now it seems that everything, or almost everything, has been said about Humbert’s disease. And then, together with the reader, we need to follow the destructive forces of this disease.

PART II

Humbert, having settled in the house of Mrs. Haze, keeps a diary of his observations of Lolita. He secretly studies the skin of her naked parts of the body, her gait, characteristic of twelve-year-old girls. He understands that writing a diary is madness, but the “piercing pleasure”, Humbert believes, prevails, and he keeps daily notes of his observations of Lolita. This inflamed his passion even more. that he was “sick with lust.” “I’m afraid I’ll get nervous breakdown again if I stay in this house, under the constant pressure of unbearable temptation” (p. 34 of the novel). He is disturbed by dreams: “Sometimes I attempt murder in my dreams” (p. 37 of the novel). Humbert’s dream is not accidental. He wants to eliminate Lolita’s mother (psychotherapists believe that the dream is a product of the psychic activity of the dreamer himself). When Lolita left for the summer holidays, Humbert searches Lolita’s closet for her underwear to satisfy his sexual desires. “I especially remember,” he writes in his diary, ” one pink fabric, worn, holey, slightly smelling of something pungent along the seam. It was in it that I swaddled Humbert’s huge, tense heart” (p. 55 of the novel). At one point in his diary, Humbert writes that he “slept with Lolita’s sock.” In psychiatry, this is called fetishism.

Humbert decided to marry Lolita’s mother: “I would be able to snuggle up to her (Lolita) three times a day – every day. All my worries would evaporate. I would have become a healthy person” (p. 59 of the novel). In his mind’s eye, he saw himself giving a strong sleeping pill to both mother and daughter at the same time, in order to caress the latter all night: “So Humbert Vyvoren dreamed and sorcered,” says the author of the diary about himself, and continued to develop his ideas of mastering Lolita: “I will force the big Geyziha to allow me to communicate with the little one, threatening the poor lady who adores me that I will leave her if she forbids me to play with my lawful stepdaughter” (p. novel). The author of the work treats his hero not only with irony, but also with a sense of hostility.

Humbert was afraid of the embarrassment of his lack of feelings for Charlotte Haze. “Again and again, the cunning Humbert conjured up a semblance of Charlotte as seen through the keyhole of the male imagination. Her body was sleek and slender, no one disputed that, and perhaps I could prop myself up with the thought that she was Lolita’s elder sister – unless I imagined her heavy hips, rounded knees, luxurious breasts, rough pink neck skin (“rough” compared to silk and honey) and all the other features of that deplorable and boring called: “A beautiful woman” (p. 61 of the novel). We see that Humbert’s view of female beauty is deformed due to nymphetic disease. For him, a beautiful woman is “a deplorable and boring concept.” The ideal of beauty for him is a “nymphet.” Developing an obsession with the possession of Lolita, Humbert continued: “We drank something , whiskey or gin, and it helped me to imagine my daughter while I caressed my mother” (p. 64 of the novel). twitched from neuralgia” (p. 65 of the novel).

Lolita’s mother dreamed of “sending her daughter to a good boarding house with strict discipline and a solid program of religious education after the summer camp. And then – Beardsley College” (p. 71 of the novel). We see that Lolita had a pretty good future ahead of her, if not for the sexual maniac Humbert, who corrupted her, left her a complete orphan, without a home and without means of subsistence.

Almost from the first days of Humbert’s appearance in Charlotte’s house, Haze Humbert has been thinking about her physical elimination. Left alone, he plunges into sad and sadistic thoughts: “If Charlotte were Valeria (Humbert’s first wife), I would know how to act in this case – yes, “act” is just the right word: in the good old days, it was enough for me to start turning out the fragile hand of fat Valeria (the one who which she had injured when falling off her bicycle) in order for her to change her mind instantly, but in relation to Charlotte all this was unthinkable – the cold-blooded American Charlotte frightened me” (p. 71 of the novel).

While swimming in the lake, the idea of killing his wife Charlotte is born in Humbert’s mind. “I knew I just had to get a little behind, get more air into my lungs, then grab her ankle and dive headlong underwater with the captive corpse.” However, the “law-abiding” Humbert renounces the criminal intention. “Had I gone through this ordeal, her ghost would have haunted me all my life.” 72-75 of the novel). But the reader sees from the further content of the novel that Charlotte still dies through the fault of Humbert.

The idea of possessing Lolita became obsessive for Humbert. He no longer had other thoughts and activities, he stopped working. The lives of Charlotte and her daughter Lolita, as well as their health, were already in danger.

While waiting for Lolita from summer camp, Humbert began to test sleeping pills on his wife. “I need the assurance that when my lovely girl returns, I will have the opportunity that night, and then night after night, until St. Catherine takes her from me. Algebra” (as Humbert ironically called the boarding house where Lolita was supposed to study) to put two living creatures to sleep so thoroughly that no sound and no touch could interrupt their sleep. During the month of July I experimented with various sleeping pills, testing them on Charlotte, a great lover of pills. The last dose I gave her (she thought it was a weak bromine preparation for anointing the nerves) brought her down for four whole hours. I ran the radio at full blast. He directed the brightest beam of a phallic-shaped flashlight into her face. He pushed, rubbed, pinched, poked – and nothing disturbed the rhythm of her calm and powerful breathing. However, from such a simple thing as a kiss on the collarbone, she woke up immediately, fresh and grasping, like an octopus (I barely escaped).

Having deceived the doctor, Humbert obtained a new medicine, “intended not for neurasthenics, who can be calmed down even with a sip of water, if you take it skillfully, but only for great sleepless artists who need to die for a few hours in order to live through the ages. I like to fool doctors” (p. 82 of the novel).

How much humor the author of the novel has here, even at the moment of the final tragic denouement, which is about to come for Charlotte, and then for her daughter. Nabokov gives a description of events in a cheerful tone, so that the process of cognition of sexual illness would not be tiresomely boring for the reader, would not turn into “sleeping pills”, as once many of our neurasthenics suffering from insomnia read “The History of the CPSU” or “Capital” by K. Marx at night. For some, one page was enough to fall asleep. However, few people imagined what harm to health and society Marx’s “pills” would cause. But one should not be distracted from the analysis of this literary work, unusual in its nature and ideological content.

Humbert’s disease is not harmless. Aggression and thoughts of molestation are directed only at minors. In parentheses, I note that our Criminal Code refers to minors as everyone under the age of fourteen. According to part three of paragraph “c” of Article 131 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, rape of a victim who has not reached the age of fourteen is punishable by imprisonment for a term of eight to fifteen years.

If the perpetrator has brought a woman of any age into a helpless state (poured a large dose of sleeping pills or drugs into food or

wine to achieve one’s goal, then such actions are qualified as rape. The court may also refer to a helpless state as a minor. The same approach to assessment and punishment in cases of a sexual nature is in other civilized countries.

With pills of strong sleeping pills, Humbert went home in a good mood. At home, he found his wife Charlotte with a face distorted with anger. It turned out that she had read his diary. Charlotte was feverishly writing letters. Humbert understood that the content of the letters was the discovery that his wife had made for herself. She left the house. In the bedroom, from under the pillow, Humbert took out the diary hidden by his wife. At this time, the phone rang. Humbert was informed that his wife had been hit by a car. He ran out of the house. At the site of the tragic crash that was going to happen one way or another, lay the mutilated corpse of Charlotte, who had been run over and then dragged several feet by a car as she ran across the street to drop the letters in a mailbox on a street corner. These letters were picked up and handed to Humbert by a girl. Immediately in his pocket, he turned them to shreds.

Humbert persuaded Charlotte’s friends not to inform Lolita, who was at summer camp, of her mother’s death, that after the funeral he, as a father, would tell her about everything himself and take her on some fun trip

After this tragic event, Humbert happily reasoned: “I had only one thing in my mind and blood, namely, the consciousness that in just a few hours the warm, fair-haired, and all, all my Lolita in my arms would shed tears, and I would begin to dry them with kisses sooner than her eyes would be filled with them” (p. 86 of the novel).

Humbert admits that he “vaguely discerned his own vile contribution to Charlotte’s death.” And then, the young Lolita was left without the protection of her parents, an orphan. A molester with a morbid sexual imagination, using a powerful sleeping pill, seduced a twelve-year-old girl. True, he writes in his diary that she was no longer a virgin, and even seduced him herself. it is a draft of Humbert’s defense speech in a jury trial. Like any criminal of this kind, Humbert tries to dissolve his guilt in the guilty behavior of the victim of the crime herself. And as a consequence of this, Humbert says: “Finally, the sexist in me (a huge and insane monster) would have nothing against the presence of some depravity in his victim” (p.111 of the novel). We do not know Lolita’s testimony about her seduction by her stepfather. Goodbye to the dreams of the late mother about a wonderful boarding school, college, etc. She found herself in the tenacious clutches of the lustful Humbert, and then – the sexual maniac playwright Quilty.

On the pages of the novel, you, the reader, will not find Lolita’s love for her stepfather Humbert. When Humbert finally found Lolita, who had run away from him, she was already married, pregnant, confessed to him that she had never loved him, so she ran away from him with the same maniac – a lover of nymphets.

Humbert understands the criminality of his plan, but he is no longer able to stop. He mentally reasons: “… In a few minutes – let’s say

Twenty, say, half an hour, I’ll unlock the door of room 342 and find my nymphet, my beauty and bride, in the dungeon of the crystal dream. the country, the continent, the hemisphere and the entire globe… After all, Lolita was only twelve years old, and no matter what adjustments I made for the environment and the era (even taking into account the unbridled American school-age children), it seemed to me that the depraved games between these frisky teenagers took place later, and in a different environment” (p. 110 of the novel). However, the fear of punishment does not stop Humbert, the mind is no longer able to overcome sexual passion. “It’s mine, mine, the key is in my fist, the fist is in my pocket, it’s mine! By means of incantations and calculations, to which I had devoted so many insomnias, I gradually removed all the superfluous turbidity and, applying layer after layer of transparent paints, brought them to a complete picture. In this picture she appeared to me naked – there was nothing on her except one sock, and a bracelet with key rings; “She was lying stretched out where my magic potion (sleeping pills) had knocked her down” (S. 111 of the novel).

After having sexual intercourse with Lolita, Humbert recalls his condition: “It was already about ten in the morning. Passion calmed down, and a terrible consciousness of misfortune descended on me… the everyday reality of a dull, neuralgic day, which made your temples ache” (p. 123 of the novel)… “There, in the hall, she sat, deeply immersed in a blood-red leather chair,” he continued his gloomy thoughts of a penitent criminal. “It was very peculiar, this feeling: a languid, disgusting constraint – as if I were sitting next to a small shadow of someone I had killed” (p. 125 of the novel). After committing the crime, Humbert is constantly disturbed and disturbed by something: the noise of the elevator door, the work of the toilet in the next room, the noise of the car. He even sees nature and cities as ugly: “Outside the window was a damp black night of a sour New England spring” (p. 187 novel); “We will leave this parched, inflamed, sparkling city” (p. 224 of the novel). Humbert hates all the people around him. As a criminal, he assumes that everyone can suddenly find out the secret of his relationship with the young Lolita. The language of the scientist Humbert eventually becomes vulgar, words characteristic of people of the criminal world appear in the lexicon. There is an active process of decomposition of his personality: “My guide to the hospital was a little old woman, like a portable witch”, “I told an unsmiling blonde secretary, a lousy bitch, that my daughter was “generally sixteen”, “At some point I was very rude to a very young and very impudent sister with hypertrophy of the ass and agate eyes”, “Then a ripe young whore ran in again with her usual gait, stinking of urine and garlic” – he characterizes the nurse, “A couple of idiotic green parrots occupying a cage in the waiting room” (p.

221, 224 novels). In his diary, preparing for the speech, Humbert wrote:

“Virgin cold ladies of the jury! … It was she who seduced me” (p. 118 of the novel). Vladimir Nabokov gives the reader only a diary, without remarks, but from this diary we see the victim Lolita’s assessment of the actions that Humbert committed. Lolita calls Humbert a “cretin”, a “reptile”. “I was a fresh daisy, and look what you did to me. In fact, I should have called the police and told them that you raped me. Oh, you dirty, dirty old man!” … “She began to complain, sucking in the air with a hiss, that ‘everything hurts inside her’, that she could not sit, that I had turned something around in her” (p. 126 of the novel). Therefore, rape took place.

In the second part of the novel, which consists mainly of travels in the United States, the author tells how Humbert corrupted Lolita both physically and morally. To make Lolita susceptible to love, Humbert gave her small gifts, then began to give her money. Then he went even further: he began to interpret books about girls and upbringing in his own way. “A normal girl usually makes every effort to please her father. She feels in him the forerunner of a desirable, elusive man. A wise mother (and your poor mother would have been wise if she had lived) encourages communication between father and daughter, because she understands that the girl derives her dream of courtship and marriage from communication with her father… Among the Sicilians, sexual intercourse between father and daughter is accepted as something natural, and the girl who participates in this intercourse is not looked upon with condemnation by the social order to which she belongs” (p. 133 of the novel). “And finally,” Humbert continued, “let’s see what happens if you, a young girl accused of seducing an adult under the roof of a respectable hotel, went to the police with a complaint that I stole and raped you. Suppose they believe you. A minor who has allowed an adult to know her bodily exposes her victim to the accusation of “formal rape” or of the “sin of sodomy of the second degree,” depending on the method; and the maximum punishment for this is ten years in prison… But what happens to you then, my orphan?.. You fall under the care of the Department of Public Charity… While I am languishing behind bars, you, a happy child, will be offered a choice between several abodes, in general quite similar to each other: a disciplinary school, a reformatory institution, an orphanage for street youths, or one of those excellent asylums for juvenile delinquents where girls knit all sorts of things and sing hymns, and get pancakes in rancid lard on Sundays.” “Don’t you think that under the circumstances, Dolores Haze must remain faithful to her old dad? … I managed to establish as a basis that we must share both the secret and the guilt with her” (p. 134 of the novel). Continuing his reasoning, Humbert says:

“Using the geography of the United States, I spent hours trying to give the impression that we were living a ‘full life’, that we were rolling down the

direction to some extraordinary pleasure” (p. 135 of the novel). In this way they traveled for a whole year. Then the clumsiness and absurdity of the journey of the thirty-seven-year-old Humbert with his twelve-year-old mistress is described.

In his diary, Humbert boastfully and cynically admits: “Thanks, perhaps, to the daily exercise of love, she radiated, despite her very childish appearance, an inexplicably languid glow, which brought garage owners, individual messengers, tourists, boors in luxurious cars into a state of fitful lust” (p. 142 of the novel), i.e. Lolita became a twelve-year-old woman.

She wanted to meet her peers, but the jealous Humbert would not let her go even for a step. He took great pleasure in stopping at the schools, watching the girls leave the school. She heaped rude abuse on Humbert for demanding to caress him, “while blue-eyed brunettes in blue panties, redheads in green sleeveless jackets, and boyish-looking smoky blondes in faded paper trousers passed by in the radiance of the sun” (p. novel). Humbert did not give Lolita coffee in bed in the morning until she had performed his morning “duties” (p. 148 of the novel). He becomes more and more cynical and irritable. Humbert makes an unequivocal hint that he was the trainer of a “confused and crouching animal” in relation to Lolita. “What black stars burst in the heart of the trainer” when he obliges the young animal to carry out his orders (p. 152 of the novel). Humbert can no longer restrain the flow of his cynicism: “I have managed to get her to render me so many sweet favors – the list of them would have caused the greatest amazement of a theoretical teacher” (p. 156 of the novel). He confesses that after a year of living with him, Lolita sobbed every night when she thought he was asleep (p. novel). When Humbert began to experience financial difficulties, he rented a small apartment and arranged for Lolita to enter a gymnasium. Humbert immediately foresaw the pleasure he would get from his bed in his study, with powerful binoculars, at the statistically inevitable percentage of nymphets among the girls playing around Dolly (Lolita) during the big break. 161 novels).

He paid a week’s salary to Lolita, on the condition that she would perform her main duties three times a day (p. 165 of the novel). “I thought I had the right to tenderly demand from her an additional kiss or even a whole assortment of overtime caresses, when I knew that she especially liked one or another of the pleasures peculiar to her age. However, it was not easy with her. She was too apathetic in earning her three kopecks (and then three nickels) a day, and in other cases she knew how to bargain cruelly when it was in her power to deny me some special kind of life-ruining, strange, slow, paradisiacal poisons, without which I could not live more than a few days in succession, and which, in view of the fundamental nature of unspeakable languor, I could not obtain by force. Well considering the magic and power of her soft mouth, she managed – in one school year! – to increase the premium for this particular service to three or even four dollars!” (p. 165-166 of the novel). From this cynical revelation one can easily conclude that sexual acts against the young Lolita were committed in all forms pleasing to the sophisticated Humbert. He called Lolita “a spoiled slave girl” (p. 170 of the novel). Humbert then found the money she earned for sexual services from Lolita and took it for himself, after which she accused him of stealing. “My greatest fear was not that she would ruin me, but that she would raise enough money to run away,” says Humbert (p. 166 of the novel). Even during Lolita’s illness, the sadistic Humbert could not restrain his sexual desires for her: “At first she had a high fever, and I could not refuse the heat of unexpected pleasures, but to tell the truth, a very lethargic girl moaned, coughed and shivered with chills in my persistent embrace” (p. 180 of the novel). that Lolita was pretending to avoid his caresses. She had a temperature of 40.2 degrees. “I knew that in hysterical nymphets the temperature rises to fantastic degrees, even higher than the point at which ordinary people die” (p. 220 of the novel). Humbert’s jealousy of Lolita’s school friends led to the fact that she was forced to leave school and go on a trip with Humbert again.

Lolita, taking advantage of her illness, escaped from the hospital, but found herself in the clutches of the debauched playwright Quilty. At the hospital, Humbert was told that her uncle had taken her away in a black Cadillac. Humbert was terribly shocked. “One simple thought stood naked in front of me: the main thing is to stay free. Had I taken any rash step, I would have had to explain all the details of my criminal life. Therefore, I pretended to be stupefied from drinking,” Humbert explained his condition (p. 227 of the novel).

“I would be a rogue to say that the shock I felt when I lost Lolita cured me forever of my passion for young girls. Now I have fallen in love with Lolita with a different love, it’s true, but my cursed nature cannot change because of this. On the playgrounds, on the sea and lake coasts, my gloomy, thievish gaze was involuntarily looking for a glimpse of the naked legs of a nymphet, or other cherished signs of Lolita’s maids and confidantes with bouquets of roses,” Humbert frankly admitted that he was unable and unwilling to radically change his erotic desires (pp. 237-238 novel). Even before Lolita’s flight from him, Humbert in his discourse sometimes “passed during the day from one pole of madness to another – from the idea that Lolita would soon be fourteen, and he would have to get rid of the a difficult teenager, whose magical nymphet will have evaporated by that time, to the thought that with some diligence and luck, it may be possible in the near future to make her produce the most elegant nymphet with my blood in her veins, Lolita the Second,” and began to count how old he would be by the time Lolita II was nine (p. 156 of the novel).

Turning to the jury in his mind, Humbert, not without some irony and with his characteristic sense of cynicism, seems to deliver his defense speech: “Gentlemen of the jury, gracious sovereigns and equally gracious sovereigns! Most of those accused of misdemeanors against morality (he does not call child molestation a crime), who drearily crave at least some trembling, sweetly moaning, physical, but not necessarily limited relations with a teenage girl – these are all harmless, worthless, passive, timid strangers, asking only one thing from society – namely, that it would enable them to follow the generally innocent, aberration, as they say, inclinations, and to indulge in privately small, pleasantly burning and unpleasantly wet acts of sexual perversion, without the police or neighbors rudely attacking them. We are not sexual monsters! We do not rape, as brave soldiers do. We are miserable, docile, well-mannered people with dog-like eyes, who have adapted enough to restrain their impulses in the presence of adults, but who are ready to give many, many years of our lives for one opportunity to touch a nymphet. I emphasize that we are not murderers in any sense. Poets do not kill. (During the monologue, he remembered his second victim – his wife Charlotte, who died through his fault). Oh, my poor Charlotte, do not look at me with hatred from your eternal paradise in the midst of an eternal alchemical mixture of asphalt, rubber, metal and stone” (p. 76 of the novel).

Humbert says that he was afraid of the emptiness that was formed as a result of Lolita’s escape from him. Loneliness inflamed him, he believed that sudden madness could “succumb to an accidental temptation when meeting a schoolgirl returning home in some alley” (p. 238 of the novel), i.e. Humbert understood that in his condition he could become an aggressive rapist against young girls.

The sublimated Humbert, as he called himself in the pages of his diary, found Rita, who was twice Lolita’s age and ten years younger than Humbert, as an “ersatz” nymphet. She weighed only one hundred and five pounds. “She only made me very slightly sensitive, but I still decided to do a test… She was so kind, this Rita, so sociable that out of pure compassion she could have given herself up to any pathetic personification of nature – an old broken tree or a widowed porcupine. When we met, her third husband had recently divorced her…, and her seventh official lover had recently left her… Her brother, a politician with an udder-like face who wore suspenders and a hand-dyed tie, was the mayor and soul of the city of Grainball” (pp. 238-239

novel). Humbert believed that Charlotte was Hegel in comparison with her in terms of intellectual merit. He explained to Rita that he wanted to find his runaway lover and kill her cat. Humbert traveled with Rita in search of Lolita for more than two years. Rita in some features resembled a nymphet to Humbert. “The strangely childish concavity of her back, the rice skin, the slow, languid, pigeon-like kisses – all this protected me from trouble… from the straitjacket” (p. 239 of the novel). Some time after their acquaintance, Rita went to prison for theft, but Humbert managed to expel her from there.

The process of not only physical, but also moral decay of Humbert under the influence of nymphetic disease continues. Having become a criminal himself, he is drawn to those who are also potentially inclined to commit crimes.

There are moments when Humbert repents of his sins. He remembered that about two years ago he had turned to a clever confessor with his vices. “Alas, I have not succeeded,” Humbert admits, “in rising above the simple human fact that whatever spiritual consolation I may have received, whatever lithophanic eternity may have been prepared for me, nothing could have made my Lolita forget all the wild, filthy things to which my lust had forced her…, that the behavior of the maniac who deprived the childhood of a North American young girl, Dolores Haze, has neither price nor weight in the context of eternity” (pp. 262-263 of the novel)… “I often noticed that living as we lived in a separate world of evil, we felt a strange embarrassment when I tried to talk to her about something abstract (which she and an older friend, she and a parent, she and a normal lover, me and Annabelle, Lolita and a sublimated, licked, analyzed, deified Harold Haze could talk about), about art, about poetry, about dots on Hopkins’ trout or Baudelaire’s shaved head, about God and Shakespeare, about any real object… “I was a five-legged monster” (p. 264 of the novel). “My stereotyped Lolita, during our unheard-of, immoral cohabitation, gradually came to the conclusion that even the most unhappy family life is preferable to the parody of incest – and in the end I could not give anything better than this to my homeless girl” (pp. 266-267 of the novel). He was like “a crust of dried dirt that clung to her childhood” (p. 252 of the novel).

Again, the author of the novel reminds us that neither the appeal to religion, nor his own moral condemnation of his desires for nymphets, nor the attempt to transfer morbid sexual desires to Humbert’s last woman Rita, who was for him the “ersatz” of the nymphet, nor the fear of punishment for crime – nothing can stop Humbert from painfully pleasant, destructive attraction to young girls.

Humbert unexpectedly received a letter from Lolita. In the letter, she said that she was married, expecting a child, that she was going crazy because there was nothing to get rid of debts. My husband’s name is Dick, he is a mechanic, he was promised

service in Alaska, but she did not give her home address, she was still afraid of Humbert’s madness, asked to sell her old things and give her at least some money.

Humbert parted with Rita forever and again rushed on the road in search of Lolita. He finally managed to find her. About three years had passed since she had run away from him.

“Grew two inches. Pink-rimmed glasses. Newly combed hair, new ears… She was frankly and incredibly belly. Her face seemed to have shrunk, her freckles turned pale, her cheeks sunk; the bare arms and shins had lost all their tan, so that hairs became noticeable on them… She looked like Botticelli’s reddish Venus – the same soft nose, the same smoky charm.” Humbert was ready to shoot her husband Dick. She explained that her husband knew nothing about their story, he thought she was Humbert’s daughter (pp. 249-252 of the novel).

Of her lover, with whom she had run away, she said that he was a jolly man, and that he was laughing when she confessed to him about her relationship with Humbert. She found herself on his splendid ranch. Her lover, a playwright, had promised to take her to Hollywood in September to see if she was fit for a cameo in a film based on his play. “There, in the ranch, life consisted mainly of drinking and drugs. He was a perfect monster sexually. He had girls and boys, a few grown men, and he wanted them to do God knows what together naked while filming. She refused and was chased away” (p. 256 of the novel). Then she worked in small roadside restaurants when she met Dick (p. 258 of the novel). Lolita seemed to Humbert “hopelessly withered at the age of seventeen” (p. 257 of the novel). He handed her an envelope containing four hundred dollars and a check for three thousand six hundred dollars, explained that it was the net income from the rental of her mother’s house, and that the attorney would send her a full statement of her financial position. Lolita thought that, as before, for money, she would have to “sleep with him in a hotel” (p. 258 of the novel). Having parted forever with his third victim , Lolita, Humbert went to the castle of the playwright Quilty to settle scores for her kidnapping.

Repentant Humbert transferred all his property to Lolita’s name. He understood that the end of his life was coming – chaotic, depraved and painful. So the author of the novel, Vladimir Nabokov, decided to deal with two child molesters.

Finally, Humbert reached this “castle of terror” with a huge tower. He took out a loaded pistol. “Focus,” Humbert said , “on the thought of Dolly Haze, whom you kidnapped.”

«Not true!” Quilty shouted, “you’re talking nonsense. I saved her from a perverted scoundrel. I am not responsible for other people’s molestation. What nonsense! This pleasure trip was, I confess, a stupid joke, but you got the girl back?.. And besides, I’ve had a splendid vacation for her. She met wonderful people in Texas…” (p. 176 of the novel).

Claire Quilty was murdered. Humbert says of his condition after the crime: “I did not feel any relief, on the contrary, I was weighed down by an even more painful burden than that which I had hoped to get rid of…” “This is the end of the cunning spectacle staged for me by Claire Quilty,” he thought (pp. 282-283 of the novel).

Yes, the end of the “cunning performance” in which the author Vladimir Nabokov played the role of Humbert; he played according to the canons of epic theater – the theater of performance (or the theater of Bertolt Brecht), without completely merging with the image, critically, with a sense of humor, as if watching Humbert from the outside during his acting. For the truthfulness of the story, Nabokov used an autobiographical literary device, which made it possible to merge the image of Humbert with the author of the novel. being under the influence of a magical literary device, they believe that Humbert and Nabokov are one and the same person. But the performer of the role of Arturo Ui or Richard III is not Ui himself or Richard III. Nabokov, who played the role of Humbert, is not Humbert himself in real life.

The playwright Bertolt Brecht often used “songs” (choruses and solo songs) in his plays. Songs sometimes comment on events taking place on the stage, contributing to their critical assessment by the audience. Nabokov in the scene of the murder of the playwright Quilty introduced a kind of “song” in verse. In this “song” there is “Quilty’s sentence”, says Humbert, but as the content of the poems shows, it is a sentence to Humbert himself:

“Because you took the sinner by surprise…,

When naked Adam I stood

Before the Federal Law

And with all its stinging stars –

For taking advantage of it

By my sin, when

I molted helplessly, wet, tender,

Hoping for a good change,

Imagining a marriage in a mountainous state,

And a whole brood of Lolita…

For taking advantage of this

The foundation of my innocence,

For what you took away by deception,

The possibility of redemption is with me;

For taking her

At the age when boys

They play with their cannon…

For what you stole

At her patron…,

I took the bored doll,

And pulling it to pieces,

He threw his head away. Therefor

For all that you have done,

For all that I have not done,

” You must die!” (pp. 278-279 of the novel).

This poetic form, reminiscent of the “song”, is not an imitation of Bertolt Brecht, but serves as a hint for the reader to unravel the “cunning performance” – that it is played in the novel according to the rules of epic theater.

In the afterword to Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov wrote: “The novel consists of an alternation of erotic scenes. Intermediate places should be only semantic seams, logical bridges of the simplest construction, short paragraphs devoted to exposition and explanation, which the reader will probably miss.” And then he continued: “There are, I know, bright personalities who recognize “Lolita” as a meaningless book, because it is instructive.” (p. 292-293 in the afterword to the novel).

That is why there was a desire to write this article in defense of Vladimir Nabokov, because many readers and critics ignored the “semantic seams” of the novel and consider the book not instructive, and the author is a person “with a sexual flaw”. But let’s get back to the novel.

After the fourth victim , the murder of the playwright Quilty, Vladimir Nabokov, having taken off the mask of Humbert, which he had been pretty tired of, no longer addressed the jury, but the reader: “There was an airy flutter of collected sounds, which did not cease for a minute as I ascended to the granite shelf on which I stood, wiping my vile mouth. And suddenly I realized that all these sounds belonged to the same genus, and that no other sounds except them rose from the streets of the transparent town. Reader! The melody I heard was made up of the sounds of the children playing, only of them, and the air was so crystal that in the gloomy confluence of voices, both majestic and miniature, detached and at the same time magically close, straightforward and wonderfully mysterious, the ear sometimes distinguished, as if released, an almost articulate burst of bright laughter, or the rattle of a lapta or the rattle of a toy cart, but everything was too far below. so that the eye could notice any movement on the streets thinly etched on copper. Standing on a high slope, I could not get enough of this musical vibration, these outbursts of individual exclamations against the background of even rumbling, and then it became clear to me that the piercing and hopeless horror was not that Lolita was not with me, but that her voice was not in this chorus” (pp. 285-286 of the novel). This monologue by the humanist Vladimir Nabokov, addressed to readers, says that the novel ultimately carries deeply moral tasks in order to improve society.

In the afterword to the novel, Vladimir Nabokov wrote that the autobiographical device helped him merge with his model (see the afterword to the novel, p. 289). Therefore, the author of the novel has to be consistent in the literary device he has chosen. He again put on the mask of Humbert: “So, here is my story… When I began, fifty-six days ago, to write Lolita, first in the asylum for psychopaths where my sanity was tested, and then in this well-heated, though somewhat grave-like, dungeon , I assumed that I would use my notes in full at the trial to save, not my head, of course, but my soul” (p.

In the afterword to the novel, the author Vladimir Nabokov gives some explanations. “Humbert, whom I invented , is a foreigner and an anarchist; And I disagree with him in many ways , not only in the matter of nymphets” (see the afterword to the novel, p. 294). In the preface to the novel, written by Nabokov, he veiledly admits that he was wearing a mask. “This mask – through which two hypnotic eyes seem to burn – had to remain in place according to the wishes of its wearer.” This is how an autobiographical literary device was conceived and used throughout the novel. In the preface to Humbert, the author sometimes calls him “Humbert Humbert” (a man without a name): “There is no doubt that he is disgusting, that he is base, that it is a vivid example of moral leprosy, that it combines ferocity and playfulness, which may testify to the deepest suffering, but do not give attractiveness to some of its outpourings. His eccentricity, of course, is a bit heavy… He is abnormal. He’s not a gentleman.” “Humbert Humbert died in prison, from a blockage of the cardiac aorta, a few days before the start of his trial.” This is how the author of the novel presented us with the fifth victim – the victim of the consequences of nymphetic disease. If Dr. Humbert Humbert had carefully read the novel “Lolita”, he would have reacted differently to his treatment for the “sexual defect”. Again, in the preface, the author of the novel says: “As a work of fiction, Lolita goes far beyond penitential confession,… we must recognize its moral effect on the serious reader, for this painful analysis of a single case also contains a general morality.”

CONCLUSION

So, the present research has shown that the novel “Lolita” is built on the description of a clinical case in artistic images, has cognitive value in the field of psychiatry. The novel calls on Humberts of all stripes to seriously and persistently treat their sexual ailments. This is necessary for the preservation of morality, health, and sometimes the life of lolitas. And, secondly, there is no evidence that Vladimir Nabokov painted Humbert from himself. This is not a self-portrait. the opinion expressed in the press of an offensive nature of the writer Vladimir Dudintsev, and after him – of the literary critic Dmitry Urnov addressed to the writer Vladimir Nabokov, has no foundation. This opinion of theirs was published in 1988, i.e. 12 years ago, and to please the communist ideologists of that time, the authors wanted to “touch the stray calves” of the great Russian writer who wrote in the West.

List of Sources / References

1. Nabokov V. V. (1990) “Lolita”. Ed. “Perspektiva”. Leningrad.
2. Freud, Z. (1991). “Psychoanalytic Studies”. Minsk, “Belarus”.

1. Author’s note. Vladimir Nabokov “Lolita”, Perspektiva Publishing House, 1990, Leningrad. In the future, links will be given to the pages of this novel. Such an approach to the study leads to objectivity and will allow the reader to check the correctness of the arguments presented by references to specific pages of the novel. ↑
2. Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalytic Studies”, Minsk, “Belarus”, 1991, pp. 9-12, 33-34. Further in the text there will be a link to the mentioned work with an indication of the pages. ↑